Said Bahaji

Said Bahaji (15 July 1975-) was a West German electrical engineer and a member of the Hamburg Cell of al-Qaeda.

Biography
Said Bahaji was born on 15 July 1975 in Haselunne, Lower Saxony, West Germany (present-day Germany) to a father from Morocco and a German mother - Bahaji was a secular Muslim. When he was nine, his family moved to Morocco, but they returned to Germany and sttled in Hamburg in 1995. At a technical university, Bahaji decided to pursue a career as an electrical engineer in 1996. He spent five months in the Bundeswehr before having a medical discharge.

Bahaji gained his Wahhabist/Qutbist views on Islam from other radical Muslim students, and on 1 November 1998 he moved into an apartment with the Hamburg Cell of al-Qaeda members Mohamed Atta and Ramzi bin al-Shibh. They met four times a week to discuss anti-United States snetiment and to plan terrorist attacks, and he served as the internet expert for the group, which expanded to include Marwan al-Shehhi and Zakariya Essabar. In 1999 Bahaji, Atta, Ziad Jarrah, Shehhi, Mohammed Haydar Zamar, and bin al-Shibh planned to go to Chechnya to fight the Russians, but Khalid al-Masri and Mohamedou Ould Slahi convinced them to instead travel to Afghanistan to train for terrorist attacks with Osama Bin Laden. He was put on a border patrol watch list when he returned to Germany, and on 4 September 2001 he flew to Karachi, Pakistan through Istanbul, Turkey just a week before the 9/11 attacks. In October 2009, during Operation Rah-e-Njiat, his German passport was captured by Pakistan in a South Waziristan town.